Floppy disks

[amiga-mad]

HI guys.

I have a bit of a silly question.

Can i use new PC floppy disks to save my work on my Amiga 600?

Many thanks
 :-D

[A4000_Mad]

Welcome amiga-mad

Yes I believe you can by covering one of the holes in the PC floppy disk then clicking on the unreadable icon and formatting it.

Actually, I'm gonna go and have a play at doing this myself to be sure :-)

[marcfrick2112]

Well, basically yes, you will need to block up the High Density hole on the upper right, but HD disks used as DD this way are said to not be as reliable as actual double density disks....

[amiga-mad]

Thanks for that.  Your help is very much appeciated.

 :-D

[amiga-mad]

Can double density disks still be bought new?

[amigakit]

You can but not reliably- better to get new DSDD disks:

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=dsdd

[pyrre]

Yes you can. And it will be formatted in the Amiga 880K DD format. No matter what disk you use (DD, HD or ED)...
The standard disk drive of A600 is DD 880K.

[amiga-mad]

Thats fantastic.

Thanks for all of your help. Im off to get some new DD disks.

Thanks again
 :-D

[countzero]

yes but

1- you have to format them as 720k at windows
2- use the PC0: devide at storage/dosdrivers
3- be careful about dos naming limitations (8.3) as it will be a fat14 formatted disk.

you can also use these floppies to transfer data between amiga-pc.

edit : doh too late and yeah why didn't I think about formatting 880k in the first place ? anyway but rumor is that they won't be long lasting this way, so don't expect them to be a reliable storage device.

[da9000]

Just for the record:

my taped-up "PC floppy diskettes" (basically High Density 2MB unformatted capacity diskettes), have been working great for over 10-12 years (don't remember exact date I did a final write on them). Many of them include games, which are obviously used every time the game is played. Suffice to say:  plenty!

[orange]

I think HD diskettes need stronger magnetic field or something like that.
Don't store valuable data for long on them.

[JaXanim]

orange wrote:
I think HD diskettes need stronger magnetic field or something like that.

HD and DD disks have different magnetic coercivities, but don't ask me why.

JaX

[persia]

In a related topic, can I get a card reader to wrk on an Amiga?

[motorollin]

To actually use a card reader you would need to add USB ports. This requires either a big box Amiga with a PCI expansion and a PCI USB controller, or a clockport USB card like the Subway.

A better solution if you have an Amiga with a PCMCIA slot (A1200 or A600) would be to use a PCMCIA compact flash reader with an adapter for whatever type of card you want to use (e.g. SD -> CF if you want to use an SD card)

--
moto

[Nostalgiac]

or as I have done, in an A2000 install a Budha + CF/IDE converter... and stick a 2gb CF card into that.

Bit awkward to swap the CF card, but works fine :-)

Tom UK